Computer animation is typically a very time consuming activity requiring computer graphics (CG) expertise and use of specialist software tools and considerable computing power. First a model of an object will be generated in the form of a 3D mesh. A CG animator will then generate and embed a skeleton inside the 3D mesh of the object being animated and paint individual bone weights onto each vertex. At runtime, motion capture data or an inverse kinematics engine drives the bones of the character, which then transforms the mesh. Depending upon the level of experience of the user and the complexity of the object being animated, this process may take hours or days.
The embodiments described below are not limited to implementations which solve any or all of the disadvantages of known methods of computer animation.